Continuing on its commitment to share expertise and insights, IIT Alumni Association, Korea (IITAA-K) on Friday October 23rd, 2015 presented two new very interesting topics to the highly motivated bright and young students and teachers of the Mu Alpha Theta Math Club of Gyeonggi Suwon International School (GSIS).

Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) universities in India are famed across the world for their alumni, boasting CEO’s of Google and SoftBank among them. The association formed in January of 2015, has alumni who work in tech industry with companies like Samsung and Hyundai and who pursue research in Korea’s leading universities, among others.​GSIS with which IITAA-K has signed a memorandum of understanding (MoU) to create opportunities for students to have career counseling and mentoring on STEAM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Math) topics has hosted the alumni. The focus of the session was to introduce students to programming and to encourage them to pursue passions and hobbies outside school.

Bill Gates in Class :D

Mr. Jitendra Kumar, a senior electronics engineer from Samsung presented on “Starting to Code” where he informed them the importance programming has in every profession in today’s digital world. Even though it might not be part of active school curriculum he encouraged them to try and tinker with it. He used a simple program to demonstrate how games work with curious students asking questions on how motion of characters, changes in colors and images happen.

He also presented them with algorithms on sorting a group of numbers, giving them a peek in to what computer scientists wrestle their brains on. This session was followed by Mr Prajwal A.N, a recent graduate and software engineer in Samsung Electronics who spoke about "Pursuing passions in life."​The purpose of this talk was to inspire the students and give them some exposure of the possibilities that their true potential can achieve. The talk was focused on telling the students about why they should pursue their passions, and how to find them. He tried to infuse new enthusiasm into the students by illustrating with examples from history of how great people achieved their dreams in the pursuit of their passions.

Prajwal talking about Passions

The session received a resounding positive response with teachers appreciating how feared subjects like math and programming were presented in a fun and easy way. Mr. Porter who is the head of Mu Alpha Theta Math club in the school suggested that the lessons learnt today could be used in regular classroom problem solving activities.

This marks the third such session with topics like Critical Thinking and careers in management and entrepreneurship covered before. The sessions would continue till April next year, each month touching upon a technical topic and a career guidance session.​IIT Alumni Association Korea (IITAA-K) is looking forward to much such opportunities where its members can contribute to their local communities and create meaningful impact for themselves and people they serve. We thank GSIS for extending this opportunity and supporting us all along and our members for making all this possible.